Godzilla — it’s more than a guy in a lizard suit trashing a movie set.

The original 1954 Japanese monster movie, which is screening tonight at the Wexner Center for
the Arts, was director Ishiro Honda’s metaphor for the destruction caused by nuclear war.

“It’s a serious film. It came out less than 10 years after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki,” said David Filipi, director of film/video for the Wexner Center for the Arts. “I
think there’s a lot of social commentary along those lines in the original.”

At the time of its release,
Godzilla was certainly respected. At the Japanese version of the Academy Awards in 1954,
the film was nominated for best picture (Seven Samurai won) and earned an award for best special effects.

If
Godzilla developed a cheesy reputation with audiences, it could be because of the
Americanized version of 1956, in which dozens of minutes of the original film were cut and replaced
with reshot, badly dubbed scenes featuring Raymond Burr as a reporter.

And some silly sequels didn’t help.

“That (bad reputation) might have been the case a couple of generations ago,” Filipi said. “I
think it’s being corrected. The people who had been waiting to see the Japanese original have had a
chance to see it.

“The American version certainly was not as serious a film as the Japanese one.”

But the monster still has appeal.

Since its release in May, the latest
Godzilla film, starring Bryan Cranston, has generated $490 million in gross globally on a
production budget of $160 million, according to boxofficemojo.com.

“It’s a brand name, like Superman or Batman. It’s a presold commodity,” Filipi said. “If any
Godzilla film has a recognizable actor or director, it’s going to do something at the box
office.”